The muzzle

The first people targeted by political ideologues are almost always the artists, authors, poets, and other creatives.

No other group has a way of striking at the soul the way these people do; often with one single image or turn of phrase they point out with blinding clarity the hypocrisy and ugliness of the people in power.  No wonder they're suppressed -- sometimes violently.  Faced with depictions of nudity or sexuality, one man said:

It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth for filth's sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or to present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength...  [We will see to it that] works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the people.

Another commented, "Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists."

Make no mistake; book bans and book burnings, shutting down or defunding libraries and art exhibits, are not about protecting children from age-inappropriate material.  There is an honest discussion to be had about what is appropriate for children to learn about at what age, and no one -- liberal or conservative -- disputes that point.  This, however, goes way beyond that.

The people doing this don't want anyone, anywhere, to have access to books or art that runs against the straight White Christian agenda.  So the first to go are creative works by or about minorities, anything dealing openly with sexuality, and anything that even mentions LGBTQ+ people; i.e., anything labeled "degenerate."  It's not like the goal isn't obvious, especially with regards to sexuality.  "All things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual," said one government official, "but signify the life and death of the nation."

And once that kind of thing gets started, it gets whipped into a frenzy, because the people doing it honestly believe they're fighting evil.  One witness to a book burning said the following:

I held my breath while he hurled the first volume into the flames: it was like burning something alive.  Then students followed with whole armfuls of books, while schoolboys screamed into the microphone their condemnations of this and that author, and as each name was mentioned the crowd booed and hissed.  You felt the venom behind their denunciations.  Children of fourteen mouthing abuse.

Creative people can fight back, but once the works are destroyed, in some sense it's too late.  One author, more optimistic than I am, said, "History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas.  Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.  You can burn my books and the books of the best minds... but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds."

Perhaps so, but once access is stopped, you don't even have to burn the physical copies.  This is something fascists have learned all too well.  Control what people find out -- place a stranglehold on the media, and muzzle the people who dissent, especially the artists and writers -- and you're ninety percent of the way to victory.  "Those who don't read good books," said another famous author, "have no advantage over those who can't."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alan Levine from Strawberry, United States, Book burning (3), CC BY 2.0]

The only acceptable response is to fight back.  Hard.  Especially us creative types, who are so frequently in the bullseye of the hatred.  If, as an adult, you find something offensive -- fine, don't read it.  However, passing legislation to prevent anyone else from reading it is the road to ceding control to the state over what people are allowed to see, hear, and think.  And if you don't think this is one short step from denying the personhood and right to exist of people who have an ethnicity, religion, political ideology, or sexual orientation different from the short list of ones accepted by the powers-that-be, you are being willfully blind to history.

Because -- oh, sorry, forgot to mention -- everything in this post comes from the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.  Who did you think I was talking about?

[Nota bene: the quotes are, in order, from Adolf Hitler (1937); German nationalist Max Nordau (1892); Heinrich Himmler (1937); American journalist Lilian T. Mowrer (1933); Helen Keller (1933); and Mark Twain (1895)]

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The avalanche

I always give a grim chuckle whenever someone on the far right calls us liberals "snowflakes," because when it comes to taking offense over absolutely everything, there's nothing like a MAGA Republican.

If you think I'm overstating my case, you have only to look at what's currently happening in the state of Florida to see that if anything, I'm being generous.  The right-wing elected officials in Florida are so pants-wettingly terrified of any viewpoints other than their own Christofascist agenda that they don't even want anyone finding out there are people who think differently.

Take, for example, the school principal in Tallahassee who was forced to resign because she had the temerity to show students in the sixth grade a photograph of Michelangelo's David. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michelangelo artist QS:P170,Q5592 Jörg Bittner Unna, 'David' by Michelangelo Fir JBU005 denoised, CC BY-SA 3.0]

David was originally commissioned to be placed in Florence Cathedral.  In, to make it abundantly clear, a Christian house of worship.  But it was soon considered such a masterpiece of art that it was taken out -- and placed in the public square outside the Palazzo Vecchio, so it could be seen by everyone.

But now?  According to the elected officials of Florida, whose sensibilities haven't even caught up to the sixteenth century, we can't have sixth graders see a world-renowned piece of sculpture, evidently because then they'll find out that people have genitals.

Then there's book bans.  Clay County School District just announced a new list of books that are officially banned from any school in the district, bringing the total up to 355.  Here are the new additions:

It doesn't take a genius to notice a pattern, here.  Anything dealing with LGBTQ+ themes (Heartstopper, Radio Silence, One Man Guy), anything to do with the Black experience (Americanah, Notes from a Young Black Chef, Punching the Air, and Black Brother, Black Brother, among many others), anything criticizing Republicans (Russian Hacking in American Elections), and anything written by an outspoken liberal (The Fault in Our Stars, Slaughterhouse Five).  

Apparently we can't have anyone finding out there's a world out there besides those who are straight, white, Christian conservatives.

You'd think if these people were as confident in the self-evident righteousness of their own beliefs as they claim to be, they wouldn't be so fucking scared of the rest of us.

I think the problem here is that we've allowed the purveyors of this narrow-minded, bigoted bullshit to portray themselves as the valiant defenders of the cause, instead of calling them what they are: craven cowards.  They are constantly, deeply fearful, afraid that any exposure to a view beyond their own tiny, terrified world will cause the entire thing to come crashing down like a house of cards.

It's pathetic, really.  No wonder so many of them carry assault rifles when they go to Walmart.

When it comes down to it, though, isn't all fascism about fear?  Why would you be so desperate to build an autocracy if you weren't afraid of dissent?  Yeah, there's the attraction of power and its perks, I get that; but really, the desperation to crush all opposing views is born from a deep-seated and terrified knowledge that if people find out there are other ways, they'll realize they've been lied to and start demanding scary stuff like free speech and free access to information.

So to Ron DeSantis and his cronies who are so determined to erase those of us who aren't like them: I'm sorry you're so bone-shakingly terrified.  I do feel badly for you, because it must be a horrible way to live.  But just because I pity you doesn't mean that I and the others like me are going to stand silent and let you erase us.  You want to fight?  Well, battle joined.

I think you're about to find out that a bunch of snowflakes together create an avalanche.

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A ban on questioning

When I was sixteen years old, I signed up for a class called Modern American Literature.  I wasn't much of a reader -- English and History tended to be my worst subjects by a large margin -- but the class seemed better at least than slogs like Shakespeare and Nineteenth Century Poetry.

The teacher was a young woman named Ms. Beverly Authement, and her enthusiasm was infectious even for a mediocre student like myself.  So when it came time for us to choose books to read, I went through the list with at least a slightly better than average attitude.

The problem is, I hadn't heard of almost any of the books on the list, and wasn't sufficiently motivated to ask for suggestions, so I picked one more or less at random.  My choice was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

And my mind hasn't been the same since.

The story is the tale of a 17th century Peruvian priest, Brother Juniper, who is trying to make sense of the deaths of six villagers in a bridge collapse.  Why would God do such a thing?  What linked the six?  There had to be a reason, after all, that he selected these six to die, and no others.  So Brother Juniper delves into their histories, finds out what circumstances led to their being on the bridge the moment it broke apart and plunged them to their deaths.

And in the end, he concludes that either there is no reason for such things, or the reason is so subtle that it is beyond the human mind to discern it.  And in the devastating last pages, Brother Juniper is found guilty of the heretical action of doubting the divine will by the Inquisition and is burned at the stake, along with all of his writings.

Heavy stuff, and not something that you'd usually think of as a page-turner for a sixteen-year-old male.  But I couldn't put it down.  And the questions it opened in my mind took me to a new place in my understanding of the world -- which is what all good books should do.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is why the actions of some parents and the response of the administration in Tallahassee, Florida are so completely wrongheaded.

A summer reading list for Lincoln High School included Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, a novel told from the point of view of an autistic fifteen-year-old.  It has been lauded as a masterpiece, and in fact was recently turned into a Broadway play.  But the book contains swearing, and represents some adults as struggling with the truth of religion.

So a cadre of parents approached the principal asking that it be removed from the list, and the principal capitulated.

The parents are saying this isn't about censorship.  "I am not interested in having books banned,” said Sue Gee, who spearheaded the effort.  “But to have that language and to take the name of Christ in vain — I don’t go for that. A s a Christian, and as a female, I was offended.  Kids don’t have to be reading that type of thing and that’s why I was asking for an alternative assignment.  I know it’s not realistic to pretend bad words don’t exist, but it is my responsibility as a parent to make sure that my daughter knows what is right or wrong."

She's "not interested in having books banned?"  Then what does she call "removing a book from a reading list because of ideological objections?"

And you know, Ms. Gee, if reading one book that asks some deep questions is enough to shake your daughter's faith, then there wasn't much there to begin with.  It's something that has struck me more than once; the tendency of the religious to represent their god as all-powerful and all-knowing and invincible, but simultaneously to feel like the whole edifice is so vulnerable and weak that it will crumble if a few people ask questions or have different viewpoints.

So what should a parent do if a child brings home a book that brings up some troubling points, or uses inappropriate language?  Discuss it with her.

After she reads it.

Because we're not talking about assigning Portnoy's Complaint to third graders, here.  These are young adults who soon will be off in college or at jobs, and will have to face a great deal more questioning of their own motives, beliefs, and attitudes than could ever come up in a single novel.  Keeping kids in some kind of protected, isolated hothouse out of fear is only going to have the effect of making it an even ruder shock when they run into the real world -- which will happen sooner or later no matter what.

Teenagers should be reading things that make them ask questions, that challenge their assumptions, that leave them changed by the last page.  If these things aren't happening, then reading turns into one of two things -- an echo chamber for what they already believed, or a set of literary drills with no purpose other than to force them to keep their eyes moving across the page.  As I tell my Critical Thinking students on the first day of class, "It is perfectly acceptable for you to leave this class in June with your beliefs unchanged.  It is not acceptable for you to leave with your beliefs unquestioned."

But such an attitude is intensely frightening to people like Gee, who apparently consider any exposure their children have to different worldviews a threat.  Worse still is the fact that the principal, Allen Burch, caved in and removed the book from the list rather than fighting the demagogues who made the demands.

And in the end -- as usual -- the students lose.  Because these sorts of acts are completely antithetical to education, a word whose etymology is from the Latin verb educare, meaning "to draw out of."  We often forget that, don't we?  Education isn't about stuffing facts into children's brains; it's about drawing out of them what they're capable of becoming.

Or as Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka put it, "Education should be a grenade we detonate beneath stagnant ways of thinking."